The earliest warning sign was something so small that it was hardly noticed at all.

The National Data Buoy Center's buoy 44011, anchored off Georges Bank 170 miles east of Hyannis, Massachusetts, appeared to be sending a faulty signal. That was the only sign from any scientific instrument anywhere in the world that two billion human lives had just come into mortal jeopardy.

The warning should have come weeks earlier, could have come years earlier. There were climatologists who were concerned enough to have begun studies that would lead to the deployment of a warning system. But there was no budget. Congress, mired in its false debate about whether global warming was even happening, wouldn't pay for any studies of the flow of the North Atlantic Current, even though it is the lifeblood of our world.

What happened off Georges Bank was this: The water temperature reading from this six-meter Nomad buoy fell suddenly from 48.1 degrees Fahrenheit to 36.3 degrees. This is a huge drop in seawater temperature to happen overnight, and it caused the National Data Buoy Center to list the buoy as malfunctioning. The issue was noted, and a bulletin was distributed within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the effect that water temperature readings from this buoy were to be disregarded until after routine maintenance was next performed.

This standard notice never reached anybody who might have been concerned about its true meaning.

A few days later, another buoy appeared to malfunction. This one was part of the Global Ocean Observing System, feeding data to the Australian Oceanographic Data Centre from its station in the Southern Ocean a thousand miles from the Antarctic. Operating under the protocols of the Global Temperature-Salinity Profile Program, AODC transmitted the data to Canada's Marine Environmental Data Service. Again, the failure of a buoy was duly noted, but the maintenance bulletin didn't reach the same people who'd seen the one for the buoy off Georges Bank. Why would it? Maintenance of the Antarctic buoy would be performed by the Australians, not the Americans.

Mankind's greatest civilization now had only a few weeks to live.

Had the scientists working on the Atlantic Climate Change Experiment known what had happened, they would certainly have been alarmed. As it was, their plan to release one hundred subsurface drifting buoys to study the North Atlantic Current was still in the preparation stage, still waiting on funding.

Even though there was no source of data to sound the warning that the world's greatest ocean current had just changed its route, it wasn't long before people from Sydney to Tokyo, from Vladivostok to Dusseldorf, from London to Los Angeles, knew that something had gone terribly wrong with the weather.

New York had been experiencing the warmest February on record. Temperatures were reaching their highest levels ever recorded for the month-- 91 degrees Fahrenheit.

Once, people would have been laughing. Nobody was laughing now.

Across the whole southern coast of the United States, from Brownsville, Texas, to Cape Fear, North Carolina, an unusual southerly flow of air began. Tender young leaves shuddered on early sprouting trees in south Texas. In Mississippi, ancient oaks tossed and bowed. Along the Carolina coast, the wind hissed through pine forests. In the warm, winter-naked northeast, clattering limbs and moaning eaves made it sound cold. But it was not cold. In fact, temperatures and humidity were rising. As far as the United States was concerned, even though it was the dead of winter, summer had begun.

In Australia and New Zealand, the opposite happened. The austral summer, which had been fairly normal through January, began to show signs of an unexpected change in February, when snow now began falling in the mountains of New Zealand's southern island. Record cold gripped Auckland. Australia, farther north, remained locked in record heat, but it was clear that this would soon change.

At the Russian Federation's Meteorological Data Processing Center at Obninsk, an image was picked up off a high-density data stream from an orbiting ENVISAT satellite that confirmed what ground observers were reporting: an extremely unusual storm had suddenly formed over the Russian Arctic. Weather systems like this had been seen only a few times before. The first one, which had formed over Duplin County, North Carolina, on the night of April 15, 1999, had been dubbed the "tornadocane." It was a massive tornado-producing supercell with the circulation characteristics of a hurricane. Winds in the system had reached 165 miles an hour. It had even formed an eye in an area near the mesocyclone, or tornado-producing region of the storm.

Instantly recognizing how unusual the storm they were seeing was, the Russian scientists reported it to the World Meteorological Organization. China's FY-1 Polar Orbiting Meteorological Satellite Program was also watching the storm's development. They sent the WMO an urgent message: The storm's CAPE, or collective available potential energy, appeared to be rising at a very high rate.

What a storm like that was doing there at this time of year, nobody knew -- let alone why it was becoming so powerful.

All across southern Europe, from Madrid to Istanbul, a hard, dry wind began roaring up from the south. In New York, low, wet clouds had been swarming northward for two days. In Atlanta, average wind speeds had reached thirty miles an hour. In Houston, the average speed was forty.

All over the world, meteorologists were watching the situation. So far, however, nobody had connected what was happening in different parts of the planet. Thinking was still highly localized, although numerous research facilities were observing the data being transmitted by the Russian and Chinese satellites.

Then a typhoon appeared in the central Pacific. It formed over a matter of hours-- faster, in fact, than had any typhoon ever previously recorded. Inside of a week, this massive storm was menacing coastlines from the Philippines to Japan. It was graded a Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, and declared a supertyphoon. It was called Max.

The U.S. National Severe Storms Laboratory, recognizing the extraordinary power of this storm, began to acquire data on it from all available sources. Close to the center of the system, wind gusts were exceeding two hundred miles an hour. Emergency weather bulletins went out across the whole of the Pacific.

Meanwhile, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology was observing another kind of system on the high seas south and west of Tasmania. This system was moving on a track that had never been seen before.

They also reported this storm to the World Meteorological Organization. Realizing that it was now receiving data on three extremely unusual storms in different parts of the world, the WMO appealed to the U.S. National Severe Storms Laboratory for help in interpreting the situation.

With wind speeds now reaching 200 miles an hour, Max was raised to Category 5. There was a possibility that it would become the strongest storm ever recorded. The "tornadocane" over the Russian Arctic was becoming part of a system of similar storms that appeared to be forming with the North Pole as their rough center.

But in Paris, temperatures were rising toward the nineties. In New York and Toronto, southerly winds in excess of forty miles an hour were being recorded.

A supertanker, the Exxon Invincible, reported that it was taking on water off Cape Race, Newfoundland, and in danger of breaking up. From Newfoundland to North Carolina the alert was sounded: The area was in peril of the greatest oil spill in history.

In Dallas, you could smell the salt tang of the Gulf of Mexico three hundred miles to the south. In London, temperatures, which had been reaching through records, had finally begun dropping. Across Europe, storms began to crash and roar, and the nights of fifty cities were streaked by lightning.

By now, climatologists and meteorologists worldwide were aware that the planet's weather was in upheaval. At the U.S. National Severe Storms Laboratory the crucial question was first asked: Why?